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An occasional paper on digital media and learning Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In this paper, Henry Jenkins addresses what schools ought to be doing to prepare our students for what is being called participatory culture. Participatory culture has exploded since the advent of the internet and its subsequent evolution into what is being called Web 2.0 which facilitates information sharing, collaborating, networking and creating. Roughly half of teens in the U.S. have created media content and one third have shared content they produced on the web (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005). Since this study I am sure it as increased. Jenkins outlines that participatory culture is one with “low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices” (p.3). He goes on to highlight some of the forms of this emerging culture such as affiliations where people are part of an online community such as Facebook, expressions which is the production of new creative forms whereby one takes an existing work and modifies and adds to it or even incorporates it into something else, collaborative problem-solving which is working together online to complete tasks, and circulations which shape the flow of media through such things as podcasts and blogs.

Jenkins goes on to suggest that there is growing evidence which points to many benefits to this new culture. He argues that access to this culture provides a very important curriculum to those who are in and leaves behind those who are out with serious implications for school and workplace success. This then leads to the obvious conclusion that schools should make this hidden curriculum explicit and make sure all students have access to it. Access is not the only issue however. Jenkins highlights three concerns which suggest the need for a well thought response from the school system. One concern is the participation gap which essentially means not all people have access to this culture. The second is what he calls the transparency problem which is the need for critical thinking skills to help people understand how the media can shape perceptions of the world. And the third is what he calls the ethics challenge which emerges when one starts to take on a public role and become a producer of content.

Jenkins highlights the set of skills that will be critical for someone to become part of this new culture. These skills reflect the new media literacies that have emerged because of this new culture. He defines these new literacies as a set of cultural competencies and social skills. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from a more traditional view of individual expression to community involvement requiring social skills enabling collaboration and networking. Jenkins is quick to point out that these new literacies do not replace traditional ones but build upon them. The new skill set includes (p. 4):

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving (Jenkins goes on to highlight the learning that can take place from a young child’s baseball card collection) Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery (Jenkins highlights the benefits of some educational video games whereby participants take on various characters, one such example being that of a girl who took on the role of a loyalists during the American Revolution and its implications for political violence) Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes (Jenkins highlights the learning that can take place through various simulation games) Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content (Jenkins goes on to explain how art does not exist in a vacuum but is something that emerges from previous cultural building blocks and that we need to rethink ownership issues in this new participatory culture) Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details (Jenkins argues that perhaps the youth of today do not have short attention spans but are focusing on several things at once with beneficial aspects to this) Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities (this creates a shift in how we look at intelligence in the sense that it is something that is built instead of simply possessed) Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal (the idea that collectively we are much smarter than in isolation) Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities (think of Hollywood as an example of this where they take a story and turn it into a movie, and then actions figures, trading cards, video games, comic books and a whole franchise emerges) Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information (important implications of this is that students are no longer limited by whether or not they possess large knowledge bases, but on whether they can network to access this knowledge) Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms (as the world gets smaller this becomes crucial)

Jenkins goes on to then highlight the role of the different stakeholders are in our students’ lives, namely educators, after school programs, and parents. For educators we have to shift our focus when thinking about the teaching of media literacy from treating it as another subject to teach to a paradigm shift that reshapes the way we teach every subject. We need to take a cross curricular approach where teaching media literacy is embedded into most of our teaching. After school programs can provide much of the informal time needed to the play with the technologies and create content that allow for full participation in the participatory culture. After school programs are excellent places for students to experiment and innovate. Jenkins also sees an active role for parents to play which involves them shifting their focus from limiters of their children' s access to media to filters of what their children see. back to main page